Recipe 9.3 Creating Toolbars

9.3.1 Problem

You want to create a toolbar and handle toolbar button clicks.

9.3.2 Solution

Use the SWT Toolbar and ToolItem classes.

9.3.3 Discussion

We'll create an example toolbar in a new project (ToolbarApp at this book's site) and stock it with toolbar buttons, reporting which button the user clicked. To create a toolbar, you use the SWT Toolbar class; here's a selection of this class's most popular methods:

int getItemCount( )

Returns the number of items contained in the toolbar

ToolItem[] getItems( )

Returns an array of the items in the toolbar

int indexOf(ToolItem item)

Searches the toolbar until an item is found that is equal to the argument, and returns the index of that item

Here's how you can create a new SWT toolbar:

public class ToolbarClass {
    public static void main(String [] args) {
    Display display = new Display( );
    final Shell shell = new Shell(display);
    shell.setSize(300, 200);
    shell.setText("Toolbar Example");
    
    ToolBar toolbar = new ToolBar(shell, SWT.NONE);
    toolbar.setBounds(0, 0, 200, 70);
    .
    .
    .

The next step is to add some buttons to the toolbar; see the following recipe for the details.

9.3.4 See Also

Recipe 9.4 on embedding buttons in toolbars; Recipe 9.5 on handling toolbar events; Recipe 9.6 on embedding combo boxes, text widgets, and menus in toolbars; Chapter 8 in Eclipse (O'Reilly).